Medical procedures to treat occlusive vascular diseases, such as angioplasty, atherectomy and stent deployment, routinely involve the insertion and subsequent removal of various intravascular devices. In an angioplasty procedure, for example, a physician will typically advance a guidewire having an attached embolic protection filter to a desired location within the body, and subsequently deploy a balloon catheter to dislodge embolic debris or thrombus from a lesion. In some instances, the physician may wish to deploy more than one device during the procedure. For example, if the first embolic protection filter becomes occluded with debris dislodged during the angioplasty procedure, the physician may wish to replace the occluded filter with a second filter.
One limitation with the prior art is the inability to deploy more than one device along a single guidewire without having to remove the guidewire from the patient's body. Although more recent developments in the art have focused on the use of multiple wires to rapidly deploy and exchange such devices, techniques employing a single guidewire typically require the physician to remove the guidewire from the body prior to the insertion of another device.